Scientists make jet fuel from seawater

A team of scientists in Washington DC believe that the solution to oil shortages, for jet planes at least, may be seawater.

Chemists working for the US Navy have managed to process seawater into "unsaturated short-chain hydrocarbons”, which, reports New Scientist, could be refined to make kerosene-based jet fuel.

They extracted carbon dioxide dissolved in seawater and then combined it with hydrogen, which they had obtained from splitting water molecules using electricity. This produced a hydrocarbon fuel.

According to New Scientist, this process "uses a variant of a chemical reaction called the Fischer-Tropsch process, which is used commercially to produce a gasoline-like hydrocarbon fuel from syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen often derived from coal."

Robert Dorner, a Naval Research Laboratory chemist in Washington DC, says that CO2 has been largely overlooked by people who regularly using this process as it is so stable. Its abundance in seawater makes it an "attractive" potential basis for creating fuels.

The team is now concentrating on how to produce hydrocarbons without also creating unwanted methane, which is a common product of the conventional Fischer-Tropsch process.

Changing the cobalt-based catalyst for the process to an iron catalyst reduced the methane produced to just 30 per cent of the final product. Heather Willauer, the chemist leading the project, says this efficiency needs to be further improved and that he is now considering other catalysts.

They face one further obstacle if this is to be a genuinely green process: finding a green source of electricity with which to power the electrolysis needed to produce hydrogen.

Edited by Holden Frith

Comments

Gosh, if only our ships that carried the jet fighters around also had a huge source of electricity on board, like say their nuclear reactors...

Henry Cobb

Aug 20th 2009

Great that they can do it, now can they make it cost effective i have been lead to belive extracting hydrogen from water is not cost effective yet?

pete

Aug 20th 2009

They spend a bit of money making their fuel 5% cleaner. Then they spend a lot of money marketing flying as being green. End result, people fly more, more CO2 in the air, more warming, which causes the release of more CO2 into the air, which causes more warming. Maybe the answer to jet fuel is encourage people not to fly unless they really need to. And not to do this by making them feel guilty about flying, but by calmly explaining the consequences of flying and letting them make up their own minds.

Stuart Bray

Aug 20th 2009

@Stuart Bray...yada yada. We're coming out of an ice age, so of course it is warming up.

Millions of years of warm tropical periods followed by ice ages over and over again long before human beings even existed and you want me to believe that human activity is the cause of global warming? Really? So what caused the other hundreds of ice ages & warming periods before humans even existed?